Chaucer loves this character. She gets an awe-inspiring portrait, is a
realistic character despite her knack for confirming the worst
stereotyping of women, and is mentioned in the Merchant's Tale,
Clerk's Tale, and even in the completely separate "Envoy to
Bukton."

Prologue:

"Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh
for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage" (1-3) -- certainly a
combative start!

The Prologue is a dramatic monologue in which the character is shown in
her own speech: yearning and uncertain. She attempts to preach, but is
self-destructive to a degree. What's going on in her mind? Some of this
is almost stream-of-consciousness!

The Wife of Bath starts the "Marriage Group" as G.L. Kittredge called it
(even though other marriages appear in the Canterbury Tales
fragments), involving the Clerk, the Merchant, the Franklin. More
immediate is a "Wife of Bath group" in which the Clerk is quiet and waits
his time.

The Wife attacks medieval dogma and uses aggression as her defense. The
primacy of authority over experience is turned upside-down. Experience
yields tolerance, allows exceptions, sees other views.

On marriage the Bible offers no real strong scriptural statement;
primarily the Church relied on interpretations -- more "glosings" than
prohibitions. At first, then, the Wife addresses the matter of numbers
of marriages. She has paid careful attention to one New Testament story
in which Jesus tells a Samaritan woman that she has had five husbands
and that the man she is now with is not her husband (15-19). The Wife
misinterprets: she thinks the current man is the fifth husband and that
Jesus is invalidating the marriage because it's more than four, which
naturally seems arbitrary. She then cites the case of Solomon (35ff) who
clearly had many wives. So in her first view of marriage here, it's the
more the merrier; but is this what she wants?

She speaks about virginity, noting that the Bible, even if it indicates
that virginity is perfection (105), does not and cannot command such
perfection of everyone. She speaks about genitals, noting that
"experience" (124) tells us that they're not just for urination. And she
speaks of the complex politics of sex in marriage, often using economic
language: e.g., "dette" and "paiement" (130-131, 154f). The notion of the
husband being in control is turned upside-down. The primacy of the spirit
over the body is turned upside-down.

Interruption:

The Pardoner interrupts with jovial insistences that he was going to get
married but now he's rethinking that decision. He seems to bow to the
Wife's "authority" in this matter. Why does he interrupt? The Wife
banters back with him, and he encourages her to continue teaching "us
yonge men" (187).

I'd say he's trying too hard to insist he's mainstream. We know from the
General Prologue that there's something curious about this guy sexually,
and I think we seriously doubt that he's engaged to be married. The
insistence on the inclusive "us yonge men" serves as a strained attempt
to place himself among the group. The whole interruption smacks of
unhealthy overcompensation.

The Wife then serves up a sermon on marriage essentially to the group of
her first three well-to-do husbands when she was very young and
attractive and therefore had control. Another facet of the anti-feminist
tradition comes again from her own mouth. She takes her audience into her
confidence and admits, even brags, that she used sex as a weapon of
humiliation, her chiding alternating with her sweetness to manipulate her
husbands and to keep them jealous and on edge. She has pride in her old
self and we hear of her accomplishments with a touch of nostalgic sadness
and some guilt. She even demonstrates how she drove them bonkers pointing
out double standards and contradictions in their value systems in her
long "Thou seyst" speech (234-450).

She turns her discussion to her fourth husband who had a paramour when
she was at the mid-point in her life. He didn't care about her so much so
she should talk of her own woe now. She mentions wine several times at
this point in her recollections (459ff).

Her fifth husband (503ff) was a clerk of 20 when she was 40 so the
situation in many respects is reversed. He's the one who's hard-to-get
and good in bed. She has the wealth now. He's a worthy opponent. A key
incident in their relationship involved his reading and chuckling over
stories in a collection of "the greatest hits of anti-feminism" -- the
antithesis of what the Legend of Good Women was supposed to be.
Concerning this kind of text, the Wife perceptively asks, "Who peyntede
the leon, tel me who?" (692) -- proverbially a lion's question when
viewing a picture of a man killing a lion -- in other words, consider the
source. Old clerks write "legends" so naturally women are villified. The
Wife got fed up and tore some pages out of her fifth husband's book, he
hit her, she played it up melodramatically, he was very sorry, and, once
she thereby gained "governance" in the relationship (814), they lived
happily ever after. (Except he's dead now.)

Interruption:

The Friar's interrupts next, good-naturedly calling her rambling so far
"a long preamble of a tale" (831). This immediately enrages the Summoner
out of all proportion, who tells the Friar to shut up and sit down. The
Friar promises to tell a couple tales about summoners, and the Summoner
vows to tell tales about friars, before the Host shuts them both up and
invites the Wife to tell her tale.

Tale:

The Wife of Bath should tell a fabliau, but she tells a romance, a Breton
lai. It's a Celtic courtly genre with magic. (The Franklin's Tale
is the other.) You can tell a Breton lai because 1) the narrator says
"This is a Breton lai" or provides such self-identification, 2) the
narrator says he heard it was told in Brittany (in the northwest province
in France), or 3) the setting is mentioned as being in Brittany.

The setting is "the old days" -- a nostalgic time of magic when elves and
fairies flitted about, whereas now we have only friars poking around
(879f). Irrational violence against women is a premise of the
story when one of King Artthur's knights rapes a young woman. The Queen
and the court ladies plead for jurisdiction over his fate and decide that
he's got 366 days to find out the answer to the age-old question that
stumped Freud: what do women want? (So the rapist's punishment is to be
turned loose to interview women?)

He turns up countless contradictory answers and the Wife cannot refrain
from adding her own answer (932ff). She provides a digression involving
another stereotype of women. Gender roles are inverted somewhat in that
the barber in the Midas story becomes a wife. But the bottom line is that
women cannot keep secrets.

The knight meets an old ugly woman who seems able to give him the right
answer if he'll marry her. Does the Wife of Bath inhabit the character of
this old woman? The result is the odd situation of this former rapist
knight standing before the court ladies and confidently telling them
what it is they want. Sovereignty is the ostensible answer here (1038).

After the marriage, the "Curtain Harangue" (1165-1218) or curtain-lecture
involves the hag speaking of gentilesse (of deed, not blood), poverty (=
honesty), and age (the knight will not find himself cuckolded). One would
not expect all this from a young wife, but with experience comes wisdom!

Psychological depth is added to this tale in the form of the fantasy
wish-fulfillment. But the old woman's magic is blind. She argues
positions and deportment-book virtues that Alisoun has rejected,
especially the politics of possession. To see identification is to
sentimentalize?

The hag gives the knight a difficult decision to make, and when he
leaves the decision to her, he is rewarded with the best of both worlds.
As charming as the story's ending may be, the Wife nevertheless ends
with a curse on those men who will not be ruled by their wives (1261ff).

The pilgrims respond unfavorably, or nervously. The Pardoner and the
Friar already spoke forth and will engage in their "quyting" now; but
later the Merchant and Clerk will respond to the Wife.

Works

Carruthers, Mary. "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions."
PMLA 94 (1979): 209-222.